Impossible-to-categorize DIY masters The Burning Hell – a favourite of ours – along with special guest Newfoundland’s Jake Nicoll – return to The Carleton for an early 7 PM show on Saturday, November 18th. Tickets for his wonderfully idiosyncratic act are $25 +HST. If you have’t seen them yet, get on the bandwagon, they’re great.

The Burning Hell is the ongoing musical project of songwriter Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalists Ariel Sharratt and Jake Nicoll, often including additional comrades and collaborators. Their densely populated genre-shifting songs are packed with an abundance of literary, historical, cultural, and pop-cultural forebears, heroes and villains, subjects and objects, stories and hooks. They move with heavy rhyme and a light step, incorporating a frequent fixation on apocalypse and ruin into work that celebrates participation in a mutually created, ever surprising, delightful, and even occasionally beautiful world. Which is to say they’re good dance partners and they want to dance with you. 

The Burning Hell are DIY in the best possible sense—underlining the “Do”—their albums and singles manifesting from the edges of the music industry as collaborations with independent labels and publishers, and their years of touring forming connections person by person, show by show, in town after town. They’ve famously ventured to every out-of-the-way island and inland neglected by the less adventurous, emphasizing presence and connection across latitudes, longitudes, and time, affirming a commitment to the political power of sharing music. It is a profoundly optimistic gesture, by way of killer tunes, exuberant hooks, and joyful live performances.

‘Garbage Island,’ The Burning Hell’s newest album, was released in June, 2022 on You’ve Changed Records in North America and BB*Island everywhere else.